re
governed by a Maximilian Robespierre or by a Napoleon Bonaparte, by a
Barras or by Louis XVIII. Except, perhaps, among the military, or among
some ambitious schemers, remnants of former factions, I do not believe a
Moreau, a Macdonald, a Lucien Bonaparte, or any person exiled by the
Emperor, and formerly popular, could collect fifty trusty conspirators in
all France; at least, as long as our armies are victorious, and organized
in their present formidable manner. Should anything happen to our
present chief, an impulse may be given to the minds now sunk down, and
raise our characters from their present torpid state. But until such an
event, we shall remain as we are, indolent but submissive, sacrificing
our children and treasures for a cause we detest, and for a man we abhor.
I am sorry to say it, but it certainly does, no honour to my nation when
one million desperados of civil and military banditti are suffered to
govern, tyrannize, and pillage, at their ease and undisturbed, thirty
millions of people, to whom their past crimes are known, and who have
every reason to apprehend their future wickedness.

This astonishing resignation (if I can call it so, and if it does not
deserve a worse name), is so much the more incomprehensible, as the
poverty of the higher and middle classes is as great as the misery of the
people, and, except those employed under Bonaparte, and some few upstart
contractors or army commissaries, the greatest privations must be
submitted to in order to pay the enormous taxes and make a decent
appearance. I know families of five, six, and seven persons, who
formerly were wealthy, and now have for a scanty subsistence an income of
twelve or eighteen hundred livres--per year, with which they are obliged
to live as they can, being deprived of all the resource that elsewhere
labour offers to the industrious, and all the succours compassion bestows
on the necessitous. You know that here all trade and all commerce are at
a stand or destroyed, and the hearts of our modern rich are as unfeeling
as their manners are vulgar and brutal.

A family of ci-devant nobles of my acquaintance, once possessing a
revenue of one hundred and fifty thousand livres--subsist now on fifteen
hundred livres--per year; and this sum must support six individuals--the
father and mother, with four children! It does so, indeed, by an
arrangement of only one poor meal in the day; a dinner four times, and a
supper three times,